Web namespace design: de facto standards

As the strengths of the Web's URI-oriented model reassert
themselves, some longstanding issues of namespace management return
to the fore. Consider, for example, Brent Simmons' handy little
Huevos
utility, which can float on top of your OS X screen and relay a
query to one of a user-configurable set of search services. If you
click to enlarge the screenshot to the right, you can see that we
have sort of, but not really, standardized on a URI format for
search queries.

It seems pretty clear looking at this sample that Google's style
is the de facto standard, namely:

http://domain/search?q=...

I've often thought more standardization in this area would be
useful. In general, there's no reason why names like "search.pl" or
"query.html" or "search.php" need to exist, or why the root pattern
"/search?q=xx" can't be supported. Usually it's possible to control
the namespace in the Web server, using mod_perl or an ISAPI filter
to map the standard pattern into something site-specific -- and
ideally, to hide that site-specific pattern from the user. But
hosted sites don't always have that option. In that case, perhaps a
strategy like the one recently adopted by the weblog community
could help. For example:

<link rel="searchURI" template="...">

That way, a tool like Huevos could discover search templates
just by visiting the homepage, in the same way that RSS aggregators
can discover feeds.

Some other de facto standards that could benefit from direct or
indirect standardization: /about, /products, /faq, /press, /news,
/developers, /jobs.